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On Monday, President Trump phoned into the podcast of his former deputy F.B.I. director, Dan Bongino, and announced that he wanted to “nationalize” American elections in fifteen “crooked” states—he didn’t say which ones—ahead of the upcoming midterms, in which most people in Washington, D.C., these days, including, apparently, Trump himself, expect Republicans to suffer widespread losses. A federal takeover of elections was necessary, Trump said, because he was the real winner of the 2020 election and also because “these people”—he didn’t say which people, but one can guess—“were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally.”

When asked about the President’s idea, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, who owes whatever tenuous hold he currently has on his job to Trump, didn’t say what any states’-rights-loving Southern Republican would have said in the past: Are you crazy? Instead, channelling the boss, he complained about blue-state election practices. “We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost,” he said. “It looks on its face to be fraudulent.” Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist turned public MAGA ideologue, was even less subtle. “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” he said on his “War Room” podcast. Addressing Democrats, he added, “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”

Is it panicky, inflammatory, or just plain pointless to take statements such as these seriously? A decade ago, in the America of the Before Times, this would have been a ridiculous discussion, given that it is “not constitutional or legal” to federalize elections as Trump wants, as the Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg put it this week. But we live in the post-January 6th world, so the better question to ask is this: With a President who is already the first in our history to try to overturn the results of an election he decisively lost, what more will it take for us to finally acknowledge that, when he says this stuff, he actually means to follow through with it?

Back in 2020, Trump’s covering fire for his attack on the legitimacy of that election—and to be clear, that’s what he’s doing again now—began several months in advance of the election itself, with a series of nearly two hundred inflammatory statements claiming that it was going to be “rigged.” In disputing his subsequent defeat, Trump created his own self-fulfilling prophecy.

This time, the difference is not that Trump is complaining in advance about an election that he fears he’s going to lose; it’s that his threats to the integrity of the upcoming midterm elections have come earlier, louder, and with greater specificity and purpose than ever before. Time and again, starting almost from the moment he returned to the White House, in January last year, he has made it clear that he will not accept the outcome of almost any race in which a Democrat is the winner—even when they are runaway victors. (He recently accused Abigail Spanberger of cheating to win the Virginia governor’s race in November, although she beat her Republican opponent by nearly fifteen points.) On Wednesday, in an interview with NBC News, Trump gave what is now his standard answer: I will accept the results of the election only if I think that it is fair. The point seems to be that, for Trump, any election won by a Democrat is, by definition, unfair, fake, rigged. Given how often Trump has repeated this view, it seems reasonable to stipulate that, the more the polls show the President and his Republican Party bleeding support ahead of the midterms, the more he will preëmptively question the very possibility that the elections could produce an honest and reliable result.

If only this were just a matter of Trump talking. A list of actions that he’s already taken since returning to the White House includes issuing an executive order, later struck down by a federal court, to make sweeping changes to the electoral process, such as requiring proof of citizenship in order to vote; hiring election deniers into key positions across the federal government; ordering investigations into the nonexistent fraud that he claims robbed him of victory in 2020; and pressuring state and local officials to change election laws to get rid of mail-in balloting and redraw congressional-district boundaries in order to advantage Republican candidates. In one remarkable example, which recently became public, on the day that Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, suggested in a letter to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, that the thousands of heavily armed immigration officers currently terrorizing the city’s residents would only withdraw if, among other things, the state agreed to turn over its voter rolls to the Justice Department. What, exactly, does she want them for?

And then there is what’s happening in Georgia, where, this past week, F.B.I. agents accompanied by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of National Intelligence, raided the Fulton County election headquarters to seize evidence related to Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state. In the days since, the Administration has offered a shifting array of explanations for why an official whose job it is to oversee our nation’s response to international threats should be involved in a domestic political matter—the brightest of red lines in America since the scandalous revelations in the nineteen-seventies about the government spying on its own citizens. Trump said on Thursday that Bondi had asked Gabbard to be in Georgia, though just a day earlier he claimed that he did not know she had been there, while Gabbard herself wrote in a letter to Congress that “the president himself” had directed her to be present. None of which, of course, answers the question of what it is that the Administration is actually doing in investigating a crime which, let’s be clear here, did not occur.

The Georgia case, whatever it leads to, underscores the extent to which Trump remains obsessed with rewriting history to expunge his 2020 loss. “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego,” he told the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. “I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life.” The level of obsession indicated by these comments ought to be proof (as if any were needed) that he is not prepared to accept future losses, either.

In that sense, one of the most telling of the President’s recent comments was an aside he raised in an interview with the Times a few weeks back: Trump, looking ahead to this fall, told the reporters—on the record—that he had made a mistake in not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states that he ended up losing in 2020. “Well, I should have,” he said.

The reason Trump did not go forward with seizing voting machines—or declaring martial law or whatever other crazy scheme Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani concocted to overturn his 2020 loss—was that his own White House counsel, Attorney General, Defense Secretary, Vice-President, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff objected. Six years ago, Trump had a roomful of advisers who would not have gone along with shattering one of the fundamental norms of American democracy. Does anyone think that is still the case today?

On Thursday, when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was asked about Bannon’s idea to send ICE to polling places, she specifically refused to rule it out, and told reporters that, in fact, she “can’t guarantee” that armed federal militia would not be swarming around election sites this fall. We should take her at her word. The President has already told us in the most explicit possible terms that he intends to go after the 2026 elections. Plans are being made, even if we don’t exactly know what form Trump’s attempt to follow through on his rhetoric will take. Maybe it will be ICE, maybe it will be something else. The question at this point is not if—it’s how. ♦

The British drama “Riot Women” begins with a blackly comic suicide attempt. Beth (Joanna Scanlan), a teacher on what she calls “the wrong side of fifty,” burdened by loneliness, depression, and the incessant needs of others, pours herself a stiff drink and steps up to the noose she’s hung from the rafters of her airy farmhouse. Then the phone rings: her ungrateful brother, making demands. She tries again—another ring, another request, this time from a friend. She plays the piano, doesn’t she? Will she join a group of fellow-amateurs for a charity gig? Twice thwarted, Beth sighs, says yes, and gets on with the business of living.

“Riot Women,” a BBC series now available to American viewers on BritBox, is the latest by Sally Wainwright, who’s made a specialty of stories about iron-willed older women in her native West Yorkshire. The darkness of the opening recalls “Happy Valley,” her acclaimed crime drama about a policewoman (Sarah Lancashire) caring for her young grandson, who is the product of a rape, after her daughter’s suicide. Wainwright followed that show with “Gentleman Jack,” a historical romance about the nineteenth-century diarist Anne Lister (Suranne Jones), who courted a fellow-heiress—and enshrined years of lesbian dalliances in coded writings. “Riot Women,” despite its bleak prologue, has a more crowd-pleasing premise: a bunch of broads, mostly at or near retirement age, start a band. “We sing songs about being middle-aged and menopausal and more or less invisible,” Beth says. “And you thought the Clash were angry.”

The formation of the band brings together a core quintet, several of whom are stretched thin as members of “the sandwich generation”: Gen X-ers managing the care of ailing parents while still looking after immature adult children. A cop named Holly (Tamsin Greig) retires, then finds that wrangling her wayward family is a full-time job of its own. Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), the owner of a local bar, is a second mother to her three grandkids, who live under her roof along with her daughters. It’s a full, quarrelsome house, but her situation is still preferable to that of Beth, a divorced empty-nester whose son, Tom (Jonny Green), only returns her calls to delay celebrating Mother’s Day for a second time. “They’ve all had the best of me,” Beth says of her ex-husband and her self-absorbed offspring. “And now that I’ve got nothing left to give, I’m dispensable.”

It’s Beth who dubs the band Riot Women, riffing on the riot-grrrl movement, and who discovers its flame-haired singer, Kitty (Rosalie Craig), while she growl-belts Hole’s “Violet” to an indifferent, near-empty pub. Kitty, too, could use the outlet: she’s reeling from a violent breakup that leaves her homeless and a notice informing her that the child she gave up for adoption decades earlier would like to contact her. That the child turns out to be Tom is a soapy coincidence, but Wainwright treats the revelation as a catalyst rather than a twist: Beth and Kitty are forced into thorny conversations at the start of their unlikely friendship. One of the show’s richest ironies is that, though both push the band in an “angrier” direction to give voice to their pain, neither wants to burden Tom with what they’ve been through. It’s the lot of mothers to soften the world for their children—but he can’t understand what they’ve endured if they insist on obscuring it.

Thus bonded, the pair become the band’s Lennon and McCartney, with music fairly flowing out of them after Kitty moves in. (Other members are slower to get to grips with their roles, and with one another: as Kitty tells Holly on their first day of rehearsal, “You were a bit shit, but you’ll get there. . . . It’s only a bass.”) Their lyrics often feature familiar women-of-a-certain-age plaints; one is built around the phrase “Give me H.R.T.,” and another around the hated put-down “You’re just like your mother.” The songs, by the female rock duo ARXX, make cathartic anthems of these grievances. But when the women are done screaming, the stuff they were screaming about remains.

The show’s genius lies in connecting such individual woes to societal failures. “Riot Women,” like “Happy Valley” before it, dramatizes how women pick up the pieces as institutions crumble around them. Signs of decline abound in the series (and, lately, across British TV as a whole). Beth doesn’t trust the N.H.S. to care for her mother, who suffers from advanced dementia; the band’s guitarist, a midwife named Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore), is too burnt out by her overloaded schedule to appreciate the miracle of life. Kitty is taken in by Beth in part because receiving assistance from the municipal housing office could take years. And when Holly tries to remediate the sexual harassment endured by another policewoman (Taj Atwal) by reporting it to the chief, her faith in leadership proves catastrophically misplaced. “Riot Women” ’s zags between feel-good female empowerment and frank depiction of the world’s ills can be jarring, but its intimate, almost confessional discussion of middle age, along with its understated wit, more than make up for its minor faults. Sometimes the dissonance even feels apt: navigating personal joys and struggles against the backdrop of global disaster is increasingly a part of being alive.

The show’s postcard-ready shots of the northern countryside, with its verdant hills and winding roads, are another incongruity, belying the challenges of survival there for those on the fringes. Kitty, whose worldly possessions fit into two plastic bags, is seen repeatedly in the same clothes, and bourgeois hostility to her presence in Beth’s middle-class neighborhood compounds her feelings of worthlessness. Even some of the band’s more gainfully employed instrumentalists have to pursue their new hobby on a budget—a small but thoughtful acknowledgment of the economic realities of artistic self-expression.

Wainwright has crafted her ensemble with similar care. The characters are so finely observed, and their emotional lives so wonderfully textured, that I’d happily have watched them just go about their days. The rant-prone Jess is the sort of personality that feels instantly recognizable: the matriarch who gives and gives and gives, and who expects complete loyalty in return. I couldn’t help smiling at her tendency to talk over the soft-spoken Beth, forever griping about others’ thoughtlessness but oblivious to her own. But the series really hinges on the relationship between Beth and Kitty—two women who believed themselves to be fated for dissatisfaction until they found each other. Scanlan, in particular, is remarkable, her smiles conveying not only Beth’s joy but her relief in discovering that she can still feel so deeply at all. After joining the band, she fulfils another lifelong desire by getting a tattoo. Kitty has one of her own that reads “let it bleed”: a replica of Courtney Love’s self-described “midlife-crisis” tattoo, which the Hole singer once explained as an invitation to “stab me more, motherfuckers.” Embracing misery is one kind of defiance; demanding to be heard is another. ♦

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Early one morning in December, a man named Orest, a senior shift supervisor at a coal-fired power plant in western Ukraine, was standing in the plant’s main control room when he heard the wail of air-raid sirens. Five minutes later, he heard the chainsaw-like buzz of an incoming drone, followed by an explosion. The plant had come under attack enough times in recent months that he and his team immediately knew what to do. They shut down all the equipment they could, and switched critical systems—cooling pumps, coal-dust monitors—to an emergency power source. Then they hurried to the plant’s air-raid shelter. Orest was the last to leave. On his way, two more drones descended and exploded. “When I got to the shelter, the first thing I did was make sure everyone was there,” he told me. “Then the adrenaline wore off, and my whole body began to shake.”

The plant that Orest helps run is owned and operated by DTEK, the largest private energy company in Ukraine. Officials at the company, citing national-security concerns, asked me not to go into detail about the damage caused by the attack. (They also asked me not to disclose the plant’s exact location or the last names of employees.) What I can say is that, on a recent afternoon, as I walked around the second floor of the plant’s cavernous turbine hall with Orest and my interpreter, Yuliia Vallenfanh, I was struck by how quiet and cold it was. “If the generators were running, we wouldn’t be able to talk like this here,” Orest said. We were standing beside a fifteen-foot-tall turbine, our breath visible in the air. Orest, who has worked at the plant for almost twenty-eight years, said that the stillness got to him most during his night shifts. “I know what’s supposed to be running—what should be humming, what should be spinning,” he said. “The silence puts you on edge.”

The cold did, too. “Right now,” Orest continued, “the temperature inside the plant is basically the same as the temperature outside,” which, on that particular day, was below thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Orest explained that the freezing weather made repairing damaged equipment all the more difficult and time-consuming. “Everything is covered in ice,” he said. Nearby, a mechanic named Andriy was using a propane torch to defrost the bolts on a steel valve that connected the plant’s boilers to its turbines. “I think I’ll have it open by the end of the day,” he said. It was only noon. Fifty feet below, on the ground floor of the hall, one of his co-workers added scraps of wood to fires that had been lit in three rusted oil drums. Aside from Andriy’s torch, they were the only sources of heat that I saw in the entire plant.

This winter has been, according to some reports, the coldest in Ukraine in more than a decade. It’s certainly the coldest since Russia began its full-scale invasion of the country, in February of 2022. In Lviv, where I live, temperatures have regularly dipped into the single digits. The same is true for much of the country. Seizing on the frigid weather, Russia has launched an all-out assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, with the apparent aim of keeping up pressure amid ongoing peace negotiations—and sapping public morale. “Millions across Ukraine are living through an emergency, freezing in apartments that sometimes have no heating, water, or electricity,” Maxim Timchenko, the C.E.O. of DTEK, told me, in a written statement. In large cities, such as Kyiv, the capital, he warned of a potential “humanitarian crisis.”

The bombardment has been relentless. From the beginning of October through the middle of January, Ukraine’s intelligence service documented two hundred and fifty-six drone and missile strikes on energy facilities: eleven on hydroelectric power plants, ninety-four on thermal power plants, and a hundred and fifty-one on substations. “There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that the enemy has not attacked,” the country’s energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, told lawmakers in Kyiv on January 16th. “Thousands of megawatts of generation have been knocked out.” In a sign of how dire the situation has become, Shmyhal called on businesses to turn off their outdoor advertising. “If you have excess electricity, give it to people,” he said.

At the power plant I visited, repair crews were working twenty-four hours a day to get whatever they could back up and running. There was only so much they could do. With stocks of spare parts running low domestically, Orest said that former Eastern Bloc countries, such as the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, were the most obvious places to turn for help. “Many of their power plants are almost identical to ours,” he said. Still, other equipment that was damaged in the latest attack will need to be built to exact specifications, a process that can take months, even in normal times. Meanwhile, Orest just hoped that the plant wouldn’t sustain any more damage. “But we must always be prepared,” he said. “I don’t see any signs that the attacks will stop.”

Russia began targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the first year of the war. Back then, the attacks were sporadic and spread out. This winter, they’ve been concentrated on major cities, such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro—and punishing in scale and frequency. A single barrage can include dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones, overwhelming Ukraine’s already beleaguered air defenses. At a recent press conference, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, disclosed that several air-defense systems had just been replenished after running out of missiles—for how long, he didn’t say.

The attacks have plunged large swaths of the country into prolonged blackouts. (DTEK alone has lost more than two-thirds of its generation capacity.) Many of the blackouts are announced ahead of time, though not all. Lviv, a city of more than seven hundred thousand people, situated some forty-five miles east of the border with Poland, has been spared the worst of it. The longest stretch of time that my apartment has been without electricity is eight hours. Inconvenient, yes, but far from unbearable. I’ve given up on storing anything in my freezer, and I make sure to check the outage schedule, which is posted online every morning, before I throw in a load of laundry. When the power is out in the evening, I cook dinner and read by the light of a headlamp. I’ll often go to bed early, falling asleep to the low hum of an eighteen-kilowatt diesel generator that powers a convenience store across the street.

In parts of Kyiv, by contrast, outages have lasted weeks. Hot showers are a luxury in much of the city, elevators are best avoided, and frozen pipes have become a widespread flooding hazard. Schools extended winter vacation to the end of January out of concern that the heating and electricity shortages made the buildings unsafe for students. It’s often not much better at home; to ward off the cold, people have taken to warming bricks on their gas stoves and huddling in tents pitched in their living rooms. “The Russians are weaponizing winter,” Daria Badior, a Ukrainian journalist and cultural critic who splits her time between Lviv and Kyiv, told me. “They want Kyiv to suffer.” On January 24th, a huge strike knocked out heating to nearly half of the city’s twelve thousand apartment buildings. In Troieshchyna, a densely-populated neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, about six hundred apartment buildings also lost electricity and water. Emergency-response teams quickly erected two tent camps in the neighborhood, giving local residents a place to warm up and charge their phones. On Tuesday, Russia launched another sweeping barrage, hitting power plants in at least six regions of Ukraine and thumbing its nose at President Donald Trump, who had just called for a pause in such attacks. In some areas of Kyiv, where more than eleven hundred apartment buildings were left without heat, temperatures fell to minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit.

In the midst of all this, Ukrainian energy and emergency workers are being celebrated as national heroes. “They’re exhausted,” Oleksandr Kharchenko, a board member of the energy company PowerKyiv and the director of the Energy Industry Research Center, a consulting firm based in Kyiv, told me. “But they’re still doing the stuff that needs to be done.” At a flooded power plant in Kyiv, for example, a team of divers spent six days working in freezing water to repair a critical pipe. It was a dangerous operation in a dangerous industry. Since the start of the war, at least a hundred and sixty energy workers have been killed and more than three hundred have been wounded on the job. Two weeks ago, a senior executive at Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s state-owned electric company, died by electrocution while overseeing repairs at a damaged substation. The following week, a thirty-one-year-old emergency worker fell to his death at a damaged power plant in Kyiv. On Sunday afternoon, two Russian drones exploded near a bus filled with miners who had just finished their shift at a DTEK-owned coal mine in the Dnipropetrovsk region, about forty miles west of the front line. The blasts killed twelve people and injured sixteen.

Among the few energy facilities that Russia hasn’t targeted are Ukraine’s three operating nuclear power plants. (A fourth, which is located in the southeastern region of Zaporizhzhia, has been occupied by Russian forces since the beginning of the war and has been shut down since September of 2022.) Kharchenko estimates that the three plants are currently generating more than sixty per cent of Ukraine’s electricity. And although Russian drones or missiles haven’t hit the plants directly, they have damaged substations that distribute the power they produce—and, more worryingly, substations that help power their reactors’ cooling systems. Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told me that, so far, the effect on the plants’ operations has been limited. “The Ukrainians have been working very hard to make sure that there is no total interruption,” he said. “Nuclear power plants and the nuclear infrastructure of Ukraine are really the lifeline of the country at the moment. Without it, the country would be in an extremely difficult position, if not completely untenable.”

After leaving the DTEK plant, my interpreter and I went to a nearby restaurant. On the way there, we passed fields covered in snow. The restaurant was nearly empty when we walked in, and lit only by a few strings of Christmas lights. The owner, Yuriy Sternat, a stout man with a bushy gray beard, stood behind the bar. He offered us coffee and brandy. “Let me see if I have power,” Sternat said. “It was supposed to come back on five minutes ago.” He went to the utility closet and switched off two twelve-volt batteries that were connected to an inverter. The lights flickered off. “Nothing,” he said, switching the batteries back on. “But I can still make coffee. I just can’t have the lights on at the same time.”

Sternat invited us to take a seat at a table next to the windows. He joined us a few minutes later. He said that his father had helped build the power plant in the nineteen-fifties, and that his mother had worked there as a chemist. “The plant is one of the main reasons anyone lives here,” he said. “It’s what keeps this town alive.” When the war began, Sternat and about fifty other local men got together to form a kind of territorial-defense unit. They were worried about Russian forces coming from Belarus, and they wanted to be prepared to protect the plant.

Sternat lives with his wife on the ninth floor of a Soviet-era apartment block. The plant is visible from their kitchen window. “I’ve seen a lot,” Sternat said. He pulled out his phone and found a video that he had recorded on the morning of the December attack. The video showed plumes of thick black smoke rising from the plant.

In the weeks following the strike, the outages at Sternat’s restaurant lasted up to fourteen hours a day. During this time, a local girl he knew stopped by with a special request. She was about to turn fifteen, and she wanted to throw a birthday party there. “She told me that she wanted it to be a dance party,” Sternat said. “I told her that I would do whatever it takes to make it happen.” That weekend, he turned his restaurant into a discothèque, complete with a battery-powered P.A. system that he had bought online. He showed me a video of the girl dancing with her friends. They looked happy, carefree, like normal teen-agers living normal teen-age lives. ♦